It's very, very easy for the audience for a corporate meeting to be too broad.
Depending on how big the company has gotten, odds become high that the piece of the elephant you're holding is nowhere near the pieces that the CEO / owners / etc. care about on the day-to-day, but what they care about on the day-to-day tends to shape the contents of corporate meetings.
If you want to derive more value from these meetings, it can be useful to switch context from the what is being discussed to the who is discussing. Those are the people at the company that the operator of the meeting thinks are doing things worth telling you about. They have the ear of top-level management on their projects, and it might be worth keeping tabs on them if your goal is to increase your impact in the org. But if your goal is to heads-down improve your piece of the elephant day-to-day, don't stress too much about these above-your-paygrade conversations.
Now, how do you find out more about the stuff discussed? That depends on your org. The first conversation I'd have is with my immediate manager. A lot of companies have an internal wiki of some kind to track this info, and you can read up on the topic from the meeting there. If your boss doesn't know how to know more, then it might be a good skill for you and your boss to learn. Now, if it's not possible to know more, than your company might have a comms gap and these meetings might actually be wasting your time.
(Just as a side-bar: I was in a site-wide meeting once where a team had succeeded in making one system much faster. Site lead wanted to celebrate their achievement, but he knew a lot of folks would have no idea what they did or why it mattered... So he bought some cheap tape measures, pulled one out to one foot, and then had the team that did the thing stretch the additional five around the room over and over. "This tape measure represents how many queries per second we used to support, and these..." gestures around the room "Are our new capacity. Big round of applause."
Keep an eye on folks who can do that... They know how to communicate to people who aren't in the loop, and that's a key leadership skill.)
p.s: One final thought on this topic: don't get discouraged if the company's doing something big that doesn't make sense to you. It is the nature of big companies that nobody can wrap their brain around the whole thing... That's why they are multi-person projects in the first place. Nobody at a large enough company, not your boss, not the VP of your org, not the CEO, actually knows everything that's going on.
Depending on how big the company has gotten, odds become high that the piece of the elephant you're holding is nowhere near the pieces that the CEO / owners / etc. care about on the day-to-day, but what they care about on the day-to-day tends to shape the contents of corporate meetings.
If you want to derive more value from these meetings, it can be useful to switch context from the what is being discussed to the who is discussing. Those are the people at the company that the operator of the meeting thinks are doing things worth telling you about. They have the ear of top-level management on their projects, and it might be worth keeping tabs on them if your goal is to increase your impact in the org. But if your goal is to heads-down improve your piece of the elephant day-to-day, don't stress too much about these above-your-paygrade conversations.
Now, how do you find out more about the stuff discussed? That depends on your org. The first conversation I'd have is with my immediate manager. A lot of companies have an internal wiki of some kind to track this info, and you can read up on the topic from the meeting there. If your boss doesn't know how to know more, then it might be a good skill for you and your boss to learn. Now, if it's not possible to know more, than your company might have a comms gap and these meetings might actually be wasting your time.
(Just as a side-bar: I was in a site-wide meeting once where a team had succeeded in making one system much faster. Site lead wanted to celebrate their achievement, but he knew a lot of folks would have no idea what they did or why it mattered... So he bought some cheap tape measures, pulled one out to one foot, and then had the team that did the thing stretch the additional five around the room over and over. "This tape measure represents how many queries per second we used to support, and these..." gestures around the room "Are our new capacity. Big round of applause."
Keep an eye on folks who can do that... They know how to communicate to people who aren't in the loop, and that's a key leadership skill.)
p.s: One final thought on this topic: don't get discouraged if the company's doing something big that doesn't make sense to you. It is the nature of big companies that nobody can wrap their brain around the whole thing... That's why they are multi-person projects in the first place. Nobody at a large enough company, not your boss, not the VP of your org, not the CEO, actually knows everything that's going on.